Saturn’s Rings May Disappear Within 100M Years

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

This image was made as the Cassini spacecraft scanned across Saturn and its rings on April 25, 2016, capturing three sets of red, green and blue images to cover this entire scene showing the planet and the main rings (via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute)

Stay on target

New NASA research confirms the gas giant is losing its iconic rings at the maximum rate estimated decades ago, based on Voyager 1 and 2 observations.

The culprit: “ring rain,” a phenomenon in which particles and gases fall into the planet’s atmosphere.

Some shower down at higher altitudes, while others are dragged in at the equator. All, however, seem to be transpiring faster than scientists thought—dropping as much as 22,000 pounds of material per second.

“We estimate that this ‘ring rain’ drains an amount of water products that could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool from Saturn’s rings in half an hour,” lead study author James O’Donoghue, a NASA fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a statement.

“From this along, the entire ring system will be gone in 300 million years,” he continued. “But add to this the Cassini spacecraft-measured ring material detected falling into Saturn’s equator, and the rings have less than 100 million years to live.”

That’s a snap of the fingers in cosmic time, particularly considering Saturn is more than 4 billion years old.

Sad as this news is, it may finally help answer a longstanding question: Did the planet form with its rings, or did they materialize later?

A paper, recently published in the journal Icarus, points to the latter, indicating the circles are unlikely to be older than 100 million years. (It would take at least that long for the C-ring to grow to what it is today, assuming it was once as dense as the B-ring.)

“We are lucky to be around to see Saturn’s ring system, which appears to be in the middle of its lifetime,” O’Donoghue said. “However, if rings are temporary, perhaps we just missed out on seeing giant ring systems of Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune, which have only thin ringlets today.”

The first hint of ring rain came from Voyager observations of seemingly unrelated phenomena in the early 1980s.